Larger-than-life figures like Frank Furness tend to accumulate lively anecdotes, and some of them are even true. Furness did indeed amuse himself by firing his Civil War revolver at a stuffed moose's head in the drafting room, and he actually did fantasize, as Frank Lloyd Wright recounted, about gathering together all his clients so he could tell them to go to hell.1 Other such stories are questionable: Did he really have a mistress who “ran a profitable bawdyhouse,” as Lewis Mumford reported, so profitable that she “kept his office going through the depression of 1873”?2 The most outrageous story of all concerns Furness's mighty library for the University of Pennsylvania (Figure 1). Supposedly the university, desperately needing a library building, approached the Pennsylvania Railroad and was given the discarded plans for an unbuilt railroad station. Without hesitation, Furness converted the depot into a library, barely changing the design.

Figure 1

Frank Furness, University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, 1888–91 (from the Collections of the University of Pennsylvania Archives).

No one has ever paid the slightest attention to that story, for the documentary history is absolutely clear. In April 1887, Furness was appointed to design a new library for the university, which had recently built a new campus in West Philadelphia. He studied the plans for a year, consulting experts and visiting the latest library buildings.3 Plans were approved in July 1888, and construction proceeded for the next two and a half years; in February 1891 the library was formally opened to the public. The building still stands, a stirring performance by Furness at his imaginative best. All this is recounted, admirably and intelligently, in James F. O'Gorman's 1973 monograph on Furness, and augmented by Edward R. Bosley's 1996 monograph on the building.4